The Bauhaus sought to unite life, craftsmanship, and art under one roof. In this volume, Walter Gropius provides a comprehensive overview of the Bauhaus workshops. He explains the basic principles guiding the teaching, describes contemporary developments in architecture, and illuminates the Bauhaus point of view on household utensils, which was geared toward finding the most suitable form for the respective object. Here, Gropius presents the Bauhaus workshops in Weimar devoted to furniture, metals, textiles, and ceramics, among other subjects.

Between 1932 and 1934, Jose Clemente Orozco painted the twenty-four-panel mural cycle entitled The Epic of American Civilization in Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. An artifact of Orozco's migration from Mexico to the United States, the Epic represents a turning point in his career, standing as the only fresco in which he explores both US-American and Mexican narratives of national history, progress, and identity. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.

This vibrant book tells the history of the Modernist design movement and how it completely revolutionized graphic design. Graphic Design as an artistic genre wasn't universally accepted until the early 20th century. This striking book focuses on the pivotal years of 1919-1933 to show how fifty artists redefined the field and helped create modern graphic design. Art historian and graphic artist Alston Purvis provides a concise and engaging overview of the dawn of modern graphic design and the artistic possibilities that were laid bare in a seismically shifting Europe. He explores how a variety of burgeoning and established movements contributed to the innovations of graphic design such as the German Dadaists, the Bauhaus School, and the European avant-garde artists. He looks at how groundbreaking trends in typography, the rise of consumerism, and a new focus on schools of graphic design combined to create a new language of design that is still in use today. Featuring the designs of 50 pioneering artists, such as Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, and El Lissitzky, this book shows how their work in color, typography, and composition broke conventions and set new standards in a seminal period of graphic design.

In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art. Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks that countered Western hegemony. Videkanic focuses primarily on art exhibitions along with examples of international cultural exchange to demonstrate that nonaligned art wove together politics and aesthetics, and indigenous, Western, and global influences. An interdisciplinary book, Nonaligned Modernism highlights Yugoslavia's key role in the creation of a global modernist ethos and international postcolonial culture.

This volume situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) at the centre of the early post-war American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson's work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson's published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early post-war American modernism. The development of Olson's work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage, Charles Olson and American Modernism offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of post-war American modernism.

Arthur Drexler (1921-1987) served as the curator and director of the Architecture and Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) from 1951 until 1986-the longest curatorship in the museum's history. Over four decades he conceived and oversaw trailblazing exhibitions that not only reflected but also anticipated major stylistic developments. Although several books cover the roles of MoMA's founding director, Alfred Barr, and the department's first curator, Philip Johnson, this is the only in-depth study of Drexler, who gave the department its overall shape and direction. During Drexler's tenure, MoMA played a pivotal role in examining the work and confirming the reputations of twentieth-century architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Exploring unexpected subjects-from the design of automobiles and industrial objects to a reconstruction of a Japanese house and garden-Drexler's boundary-pushing shows promoted new ideas about architecture and design as modern arts in contemporary society. The department's public and educational programs projected a culture of popular accessibility, offsetting MoMA's reputation as an elitist institution. Drawing on rigorous archival research as well as author Thomas S. Hines's firsthand experience working with Drexler, Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art analyses how MoMA became a touchstone for the practice and study of midcentury architecture.

In 1930 pioneering female gallerist Lucy Wertheim opened The Wertheim Gallery in London. Wertheim challenged the established art scene conventions; she was a woman without formal art training, driven by intuition and a belief that young British artists should have the same opportunities as their European counterparts. Adventure in Art is Lucy's 1947 autobiography, telling the story of her career in the British Modernist era. Republished by Unicorn to coincide with the forthcoming Towner Eastbourne exhibition, A Life in Art: Lucy Wertheim & Reuniting the Twenties Group (Summer 2022), this book brings to a contemporary audience the trials and tribulations of a key participant in the male-dominated art world in the first half of the twentieth century. Lucy Wertheim's discerning eye and business acumen helped to propel big names such as Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, Cedric Morris, Henry Moore and Frances Hodgkins into the mainstream. With three commissioned essays - the first by Frances Spalding (Lucy Wertheim - Her Gallery in Context); the second by Ariane Banks (Lucy Wertheim - A Pioneering Woman and Her Contemporaries); the third by Towner's Collections & Exhibitions Curator, Karen Taylor (Lucy Wertheim - Her 'Forty-One Year Experiment' [1930-71]) - this new edition not only brings Lucy Carrington Wertheim's words and deeds back into our conscience, but it also publishes over 70 artworks, many of which are featured in the Towner exhibition, as well as newly photographed ephemera from the Estate's extensive archive. Together, this exhibition and book will significantly reset the accepted narrative, and shine a light on a neglected corner of mid-twentieth century art history.

The Art of Football is a singular look at early college football art and illustrations. This collection contains more than two hundred images, many rare or previously unpublished, from a variety of sources, including artists Winslow Homer, Edward Penfield, J. C. Leyendecker, Frederic Remington, Charles Dana Gibson, George Bellows, and many others. Along with the rich art that captured the essence of football during its early period, Michael Oriard provides a historical context for the images and for football during this period, showing that from the beginning it was perceived more as a test of courage and training in manliness than simply an athletic endeavor. Oriard's analysis shows how these early artists had to work out for themselves-and for readers-what in the new game should be highlighted and how it should appear on the page or canvas. The Art of Football takes modern readers back to the day when players themselves were new to the sport, and illustrators had to show the public what the new game of football was. Oriard demonstrates how artists focused on football's dual nature as a grueling sport to be played and as a social event and spectacle to be watched. Through its illustrations and words The Art of Football gives readers an engaging look at the earliest depictions of the game and the origins of the United States as a football nation.

Modernism ushered in some of the most exciting innovations in art and literature, from Fauvism, Cubism, and Dada, to the novels of James Joyce and Franz Kafka, to such provocative works as Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain." But Modernism also left many people puzzled in its wake. How can a routine bathroom fixture be considered a work of art? Shouldn't a novel have a beginning, a middle, and an end--or at least a story? In this Very Short Introduction, Christopher Butler provides a coherent account of Modernism across various aesthetic and cultural fields. Butler examines how and why Modernism began, explaining what it is and showing how virtually all aspects of 20th and 21st century life have been influenced by its aesthetic legacy. Butler considers several aspects of modernism, including some classic modernist works, movements and notions of the avant garde, and the idea of "progress" in art. Finally, Butler sheds light on modernist ideas of the self, subjectivity, irrationalism, people and machines, and the political dimensions of modernism as a whole.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Walter Gropius (1883-1969) set out to build for the future. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, the Berlin-born architect had an inestimable influence on our aesthetic environment, championing a bold new hybrid of light, geometry, and industrial design, as dazzling today as it was a century ago. In this essential architect introduction, we survey Gropius' evolution and influence with 20 of his most significant projects, from the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, Germany, to the Chicago Tribune Tower and Harvard University Graduate Center, completed after Gropius's exodus to the United States in 1937. We explore his role both as an architectural practitioner, and as a writer and educator, not only as a Bauhaus pioneer, but also, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as a leading proponent of the International Style. Along the way, we see how many of Gropius's tenets remain benchmarks for architects, designers, and urbanists today. Whether in his emphasis on a functional beauty or his interest in housing and city planning, Gropius astounds in the agility of his thinking as much as in the luminous precision of his work. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture series features: an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts, and plans)

Jeanne Mammen's watercolour images of the gender-bending 'new woman' and her candid portrayals of Berlin's thriving nightlife appeared in some of the most influential magazines of the Weimar Republic and are still considered characteristic of much of the 'glitter' of that era. This book charts how, once the Nazis came into power, Mammen instead created 'degenerate' paintings and collages, translated prohibited French literature and sculpted in clay and plaster-all while hidden away in her tiny studio apartment in the heart of Berlin's fashionable west end. What was it like as a woman artist to produce modern art in Nazi Germany? Can artworks that were never exhibited in public still make valid claims to protest? Camilla Smith examines a wide range of Mammen's dissenting artworks, ranging from those created in solitude during inner emigration to her collaboration with artist cabarets after the Second World War. Smith's engaging analysis compares Mammen's popular Weimar work to her artistic activities under the radar after 1933, in order to fundamentally rethink the moral complexities of inner emigration and its visual culture. While Mammen's artistry is considered through the lens of gender politics to reveal her complex relationship with the urbanisation of her time, this book also highlights the crucial role played by a lost generation of inner emigre women artists as agents of German modernity. The examination of Mammen's life and work demonstrates the crucial role women artists played as both markers and agents of German modernity, but the double marginalisation they have nonetheless encountered as inner emigres in recent history. It will be of interest to students of German studies, art history, literature, history, gender studies and cultural studies.